My MPhil thesis at Sussex University. I don’t think it was a great piece of scientific or philosophical research. But it asked a question I still find fascinating : Why should we have evolved the kind of social strategies that made us think of each other as individuals rather than as mere “roles”?

Why should an animal evolve to treat its conspecifics as “people” rather than, say, the way we imagine ants treat each other? Both are ways of creating complex, co-operative societies. So why choose individuals?